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The full catastrophe?

Happy Monday. It's time to think the unthinkable.

We all remember the upshot last time communists and fascists had to share a parliament, right? Conditions in Greece today are beginning to take on the eerie cast of Weimar Germany in its final years. It's important to emphasize that what went wrong in Weimar had less to do with racial animosity or even economic meltdown, and more to do with a crisis of nationalism. With the Second Reich destroyed, what was Germany? What was it for? These existential questions are the same that face Greece, and the fresh electoral triumph of its far-left and far-right parties repeats the pattern of competing answers first put on display in '20s and '30s Germany.

Almost no one in Europe intuited that military action at that early stage could have prevented the cataclysm of the Second World War and the Holocaust. The open wounds of the First World War helped guarantee that. But now, the last war in Europe was confined to the former Yugoslavia, and the lessons of the past may sound a clearer warning. Greece's problem is primarily political, not economic. With European politics and economics so closely knit together, however, chaos in Greece poses a double threat: first, to the peace and security of the continent; second, to the survival of the Euro and the EU itself. That threat will become much more than a threat if Greece slips into civil war. Though it's too early to interpret that dire eventuality as a certainty, the West can't plan for the worst too soon.

The tinderbox in Greece is devilishly simple: the military. Unlike most countries in Europe, Greece has an outsized military budget, and the armed forces to match. Where Spaniards, for instance, have little reason to worry that militarism will flow in as prosperity and opportunity ebb, Greeks have every reason to look to the military as a solution for the economic and political problems that neither German eyeshades nor parliamentary negotiations seem able to solve. But there's simply no geopolitical space for Greek aggression, which means there's no room for the age-old political strategy of whipping up national unity by starting a war. The US, for instance will stop at nothing to prevent a Greco-Turkish war. An altercation in Macedonia is conceivable, but Greek territorial aspirations have never reached farther north. Indeed, the real issue is that a civil war now appears far more likely in Greece than a war of aggression.

A Greek civil war, moreover, threatens the Euro and the EU more than any cross-border misadventure. The collapse of civil order is the specter that hangs over Europe's constituent parts. Markets can survive and even thrive amidst nation-to-nation wars. Civil war in Greece will lay bare the full spectrum of questions Europe dreads facing most. Not only will a Greek meltdown touch off a media frenzy (Will Italy be next? Is Naziism back? Whither Hungary?). It will throw down a gauntlet before Europe. With market confidence and institutional legitimacy on the line, will the Europeans really stand idly by? Will they cross their fingers and hope for the best? Will Germany and France supply the Greek military, whomever's in charge, with even more arms? Or will some European coalition of forces intervene, largely -- if not entirely -- without the benefit of American boots on the ground? (And don't expect that American military technology will work wonders. The US is very good at taking out specific enemies from afar. It's terrible at bringing order to chaos -- as Libya, Pakistan, and Yemen show, just to name a few.)

Europe's hand will be forced. The impulse will be to boot a warring Greece from the Euro, but even that drastic move will fail to establish a political or economic quarantine. German military intervention is an impossibility. Britons have no interest in repeating the debacle of the UK's last Greek ordeal, which drove them to the edge of bankruptcy. Europe will never permit Russia or Turkey to take the lead on a Greek intervention.

Who then? There is only France. Can anyone envision Hollande sending the tricolor to Athens -- even in the name of left solidarity?

The state of play in Europe is straightforward. Greece is very likely to become a failed state. Over the next five years, civil war is probable. The brute fact is that Greece has not succeeded in demonstrating that it can and should exist as a sovereign political entity. European anxiety, international markets, and the force of media-fueled public opinion ensure that neither the Euro nor the EU can survive an unanswered Greek implosion. And the only country in Europe that can lead a coalition capable of imposing order on the chaos to come is now led by a man for whom such leadership is deliriously out of character.